When it comes to humans on orbit, Leo is getting crowded again. Three Tyconauts have brought the number of occupants on the two active space stations right now to 13. And the number of astronauts and cosmonauts on the ISS? It's about the same as the number of Tyconauts on the Tiangong Space Station. It's no wonder that the Chinese are looking to expand their heavenly palace to accommodate more crew. Today is October 30th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas, and this is T-Minus. China's Shenzhou-19 crew have arrived at the Tiangong Space Station. The DOD is reportedly increasing its P-Leo spend. Lockheed completes its Terran Orbital acquisition. And our guest today is Brian Whedon, Systems Director for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation. And we're going to be discussing space regulation recommendations that rolled out of the Space Agenda 2025 report. Stay with us. It's Wednesday. Let's dive in. China has declared a complete success after launching the Shenzhou-19 crew to the Tiangong Space Station earlier today. The spacecraft has already docked with China's orbiting space station, bringing the crew number on board Tiangong to six people. The Shenzhou-19 crew have until early next week to perform handover procedures. The three-person Shenzhou-18 crew then plan to depart Tiangong and return to Earth on November 3rd. According to Space News, the U.S. Department of Defense is reportedly raising its proliferated low-earth orbit, or P-Leo, satellite-based services program, from an initial $900 million ceiling to a projected $13 billion. The rise in funding shows how vital high-speed satellite internet has become for military operations. The United States is increasingly looking to buy-in services from commercial partners to provide low-earth orbit satellite services. The DoD's P-Leo contract is also being expanded in anticipation of Amazon's Project Kuiper entering the Leo Internet market in the coming years. Lockheed Martin has completed its acquisition of Terran Orbital, along with Terran Orbital's subsidiary Tyvek International. The company will now be recognized as Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin company, and will remain a merchant supplier to the industry. And speaking of, Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin company, will maintain its locations in the U.S. states of Florida, California, Georgia, and Virginia, as well as in Italy. Spaceforge has signed a memorandum of understanding with Voyager Space. The agreement will see Voyager Space potentially using Spaceforge's Forgestar platform, focused on in-space research and manufacturing for advanced materials and biomedical applications. The collaboration will explore integrating Forgestar's flexible, returnable spacecraft with Voyager's Orbital capabilities to create solutions for industries that rely on high-performance materials from biomedical sectors to cloud computing. And this sets the stage for future projects, including developing next-gen return capability interfaces and collaborating on funding applications for commercial customers. Satellite operator U-TelSAT has released its financial reports for their last quarter. Total revenues for the first quarter of their reporting cycle stood at €300 million, up 9.4% on a reported basis. Over 50% of U-TelSAT's revenue comes from video connection services for broadcast media. And over to Australia now, and Spaceport Australia has signed an agreement with U.S. company Titan's Space to explore potential locations in Australia for Titan's Space's development, manufacturing, and launching of the company's space planes and crafts. Titan's Space says it's actively seeking suitable locations to expand its operations, while developing its site in California. SES's Global In-flight Connectivity Network has been selected by Thai Airways and Turkish Airlines to equip aircraft across their fleets with in-flight connectivity solutions. The airlines have selected SES's Open Orbit Service, which launched earlier this year. The orbit USA and ANUVU are partnering to study the design of an innovative, highly elliptical orbit network. The additional satellite capacity would be integrated into the ANUVU constellation to expand coverage and increase performance for ANUVU's worldwide, mobility-focused customers, including commercial airlines. The UNH, the University of New Hampshire, has been awarded $24.3 million by NASA on behalf of NOAA to build sensors for a high-priority alert system that will monitor the effects of space weather and the solar wind. The UNH will monitor solar activity for potential interruptions to key technology like satellite communications, electric power grids, and GPS systems. For those keeping track at home, Blue Origin's New Glenn GS1 rocket is inching ever closer to its first ever launch at Cape Canaveral. In the wee hours of the night, the GS1 started its 23-mile journey to its pad, moving on its transporter named Gert, or giant, enormous rocket truck. Hey, if the shoe fits. And have you ever parked in a spot that someone else needed and had to move? That's what's going on with Crew 9's Dragon Capsule in Space. The crew on the ISS are going to relocate the capsule to a different docking station in preparation for the arrival of the next resupply mission. NASA astronauts Nick Hayes, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos Cosmonaut Alexander Gorbinov, plan to undock the spacecraft from the forward-facing port of the station's Harmony Module early on Sunday and then redock to the module's space-facing port some 50 minutes later. This will be the fifth port relocation of a Dragon spacecraft with Crew aboard and NASA plans to live-stream the event. Details about that live-stream can be found by following the link in our show notes. And also added to today's selected reading, Lynx is an announcement from Maxar on a new leadership appointment and an announcement from Crosscut Ventures, transitioning to space, defense, and energy investment. Hey, T-Minus Crew! If you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a 5-star rating and short review in your favorite podcast app. It'll help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-Minus Crew. Thank you for your support! Last week, the Aerospace Corporation published their Space Report 2025, which outlines pressing issues to be addressed in the United States for the next incoming presidential administration. Our guest today is Brian Whedon, and he is the Systems Director at the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation, and he authored the chapter on space regulation. I asked Brian about how he approached the report. Commercial space activities in the private sector space in the U.S. is becoming ever more important. It's growing in terms of size, in terms of jobs, in terms of impact on the economy and also what kind of capabilities are being delivered, and also in terms of how the U.S. government is looking at leveraging those commercial space capabilities for both civil purposes as well as now-streetly purposes. With that as the background, how we provide oversight of that commercial space sector has a really big impact on its ability to grow, its ability to innovate, and whether or not it's even there to make use of it. We approach this topic within that context of saying, "Yes, commercial is big. It's growing. It's important. How does the oversight, how does the regulation to use a specific word affect that, and how can we shape that regulation and reform it to enable that continued growth and innovation so that we can rely on commercial for all the great things to capabilities in the future?" Great. Yes, so how do we do that? That's a million dollar question. Great. We're done. One of the big things we do in the chapter is to do a quick recap of how this effort has been, or how this topic has been tackled by multiple administrations over the last 20-plus years. None of this is new. None of these problems are really all that new. They're very persistent problems or what we call in the policy world, wicked problems that are really hard to solve. We first wanted to start by providing that background of, "Here's what was done by the Clinton administration, by the George W. Bush administration. Here's what was done by the Obama administration. Here's what was done by the Trump administration. Here's what was done by the Biden administration." Talk through the efforts that were done both in the executive branch as well as by Congress during those periods, what worked, what is still an unresolved problem, and lay all that out there. Because in my opinion, it's very hard to say, "We should go do this without having any good graphs of what has been attempted and what that history is." I was looking at that graph actually in the PDF, and it's really interesting to see, I mean, nobody can do everything at once. No administration can do everything at once, but it is interesting to see how the emphases change per administration. It's really fascinating to see that graphically. I appreciate that. I just, as a bit of a nerd, I appreciate that. Just every conversation I have with people, wherever they are in the space industry, regulations come up and it's sort of, either the person is annoyed or they feel hopeless. We are very close to the national election. Presumably, something's going to change in some direction somehow after that election happens. Spaces notoriously, famously bipartisan though, hopefully that will continue. The incoming administration, whoever they may be, what do we hope they will be focusing on given the numerous priorities that need to be addressed? One cannot do everything or maybe can't handle it. Let me just, there are such expectations here, right? For all those of us in the space world, I think this is the most important thing on the planet, it is, I would say, not by any reasonable sense at the top of anyone's overall national policy list, either from economics or from national security. There's many, many other issues that are being debated on. Most people notice probably that space hasn't really come up in this election at all, right? Because it's just not a topic that is on voters, most voters' minds, and it's not something that their politicians really think is going to swing voters. First let's just sort of keep that in the background. We talk about this in the important space, sort of keep that realism. We do think, however, that in the context of space, there are some important decisions that are going to be done, mainly because, as I sort of mentioned earlier, some of these decisions, we haven't made decisions, right? We've been talking about, we've been talking about a problem, we've been talking about an issue, we've been proposing one option or another, and in some cases, it's been going up for 10 or 15 years. So the issue is, how do we actually get to a decision? And that can be very difficult because there's lots of different constituencies within the administration itself. You have the challenges of the White House working with Congress, especially if they're being controlled by different parties. There's, of course, different constituencies outside the government, in the private sector, there's international and foreign policy concerns. All of that feeds back into why, again, we were saying, "This is a wicked problem. This is not easy. We're not solving it because we're ignoring it. We're not solving some of these challenges because they are truly hard." And in many cases, there is no solving. There is just putting in a slightly better version that improves things and then iterating that and improving over time. Often case, wicked problem, that's the way you get to things. Yeah, mitigation. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. And so, as an example, I'll talk a little bit about export controls, which is one of the areas that we talk about, which interestingly is not something that often comes up as a regulatory issue. But when you look at, talk to companies and you look at sort of what they spend their time on and what they spend their legal fees on, it is a huge part of what they have to deal with. The long story short, in the late 1990s, there were some issues with technology transfers from U.S. commercial companies. The China, as a result, Congress sort of moved everything related to space under the strictest export controls possible, what we call the U.S. Mutations List and the International Technology Site, ITAR List, right? And required a legislative department. And it was that way for a long time. During the Obama administration, there was a huge multi-year effort to change that. And they succeeded in a couple of things. One, they got Congress to hand permission back to the executive branch to determine what technologies go on that state-controlled munitions list versus the commerce control list that is slightly easier to get licenses on. That was a big deal. And then they went through a huge process of actually sorting through what goes in either place, and they moved a bunch of commercial space things, particularly commercial communication satellites over to the CCL, which reduced the requirements. But it certainly didn't end the issue, right? The Trump administration under the face policy director, too, said they're going to look at this again, but there was not actually any decision. And just a couple of weeks ago, we got an announcement from the Biden administration that they are proposing a bunch of other changes of shifting technologies for one list of the other, and also waiving license requirements for certain close allies and partners. Now none of that is all final. There's still somebody who needs to go through a process. But that just gives a little bit of flavor for the complexity of this and how long this issue sort of dates back in time. One question that I can't help but ask, do we know if there's a definitive difference between a potential Trump administration or a potential Harris administration incoming in terms of space policy? Do we know one might be, do you want or another? It's just way too nuanced an issue to declaratively say one way or the other. So we don't get into that in the chapter. And in fact, you know, we're putting forward these recommendations regardless of who wins. I can say looking backwards, there is, I would say, more bipartisanship or continuity over Republican Democratic administrations in broadly than there is differences. I mentioned the extra control, right? That was an issue that both the Obama administration and the Trump administration worked on and now the Biden administration worked on. Another example is remote sensing licensing reform. The Obama administration started something there. The Trump administration really made some massive changes there. And now under the Biden administration, they're working on implementation of that. Another good example is space traffic management. The Obama administration really started the first formal interagency process on that, but didn't reach a formal presidential decision. The Trump administration picked it up. They kept quite a bit of the prep work that had been done in terms of definitions and terms, but they made some tweaks to which agencies were going to be the lead for that. And then they published Space Policy Directive 3, which was the first US presidential policy on space traffic management. And now under the Biden administration, they have kept up implementation of that through the Office of Space Commerce and the Department of Commerce. They renamed what it is from something called this orbital database of data to something called TRAC. So again, some tweaks at the margins, but the general thrust has been pretty much the same. Let's start. We'll be right back. Welcome back. When you become an American citizen, you get to vote. You've heard enough about that lately, I'm sure. And as a US citizen, you will also occasionally get a little letter in the mail every few years, one that I know makes me just go, "Oh joy!" as soon as I spot it. There's nothing like it. An official jury duty summons. Yay. Selection for jury duty is done via a random lottery, but if you get picked and have very special extenuating circumstances or over a certain advanced age, you can defer your service permanently or at least a year. The list of ways you can excuse yourself varies by the state that you live in, but isn't it funny? As far as anyone can tell, being in orbit hasn't yet made it to the official list of reasons why you can't sit on a jury. Well, someone's going to need to add it on there, as apparently NASA astronaut Don Pettit has been summoned for jury duty. A little problem though. He's currently on board the International Space Station. Don's son posted on ex this message, "My family just got served two jury summons at once and as if that wasn't absurd enough, one is for the one of us in space right now. Space, space. Orbiting 17.5k miles per hour above our heads. What should I tell the judge? Wrong answers only." Being 250 miles away from doing your civic duty may be a very long car drive to the courthouse, but it's a lot more complicated when you are that distance up. That's it for T-Mine. It's for October 30th, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Vormazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
